Edwards as Art: An answer to the question, "Where are the graphs?"

Years ago in my PhD dissertation defense, one of the examiners posed a question out of curiosity, “Where are the graphs?” I had asked myself that question many times during my research… When dealing with Edwards’s “Miscellanies” and other notebooks, one senses the presence of magnificent structures which elude capture on ink and paper. Even if a motivated scholar invested sufficient time and energy developing a series of conventional charts and tables which attempted to comprehensively trace a single theological topic throughout Edwards’s writings, the result would be a massive, yet one-off, static production.

An effective approach to tracing the intricate contours of Edwards’s thought would require something more artistic, dynamic, and interdisciplinary. I envisioned something akin to a spinning, perpetual motion machine which would never tire of producing beautiful answers to my simple queries. I wanted Visual Edwards, as I later called it, to be a reading companion, an Alexa or Siri, if you will, which floated on the screen alongside The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online.

Such a project required a creative approach which marshaled the power of code to elicit dynamic, visual representations from JE, along with matching indexes linked to his online corpus…

Today, Visual Edwards software brings the poetry of code to Edwards’s symphonic theology, summoning from his writings and thought beautifully complex, three-dimensional visualizations which are navigable via mouse or tablet touchscreen.